The Weirdest Thing About 2020 - Nobody Clarifies to Trump the Penalty for Treason

Maybe the weirdest thing about 2020 is that Trump can say that he'll violently resist leaving office if he loses the election and we learn that Republicans and Democrats alike are too timid to clarify to him that treason comes with a death penalty. Trump is a thug who refuses to play by the rules and the GOP are cowards intimidated by this thug and Democrats insist on playing by the rules that he will ignore. And so we’re going to get rid of democracy because a reality TV star who thinks he’s being paid $400,000 a year to tweet decides that he doesn’t like elections.

T.S. Elliot's Poem the Hollow Men closes,

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.”

It seems like it's also the way that democracy will end in America, everyone afraid to mention the penalty for destroying the democracy that so many Americans died to create and protect, afraid to make a fuss out of the fact that a sitting president won’t accept election results. One of the aha’s I had reading history is that people have exactly as much power as other people give them. The Pope could have you burned at the stake for saying the wrong thing … until people decided that he didn’t.

So does Trump have the power to end our 231 year old democracy? If people decide that his feelings and opinion are more important than our democracy, he does. People will argue precedent and tradition and process and laws but it is not that complicated. We decide which is more important: our democracy or Trump’s feelings.

Or maybe this is the weirdest thing about 2020. There are millions of Americans who are actually debating which is more important.

Will Hillary's Campaign Strategy Make the Country More Polarized?

Today's NY Times has an article about Hillary Clinton's probable strategy, written by Jonathon Martin and Maggie Haberman. Bill Clinton went after (and won) states like Kentucky whereas Barack Obama focused on fewer states with an agenda that had less broad-based appeal. It seems that Hillary will be more like Obama in this regards, focusing on rallying more liberal voters rather than appealing to more moderate swing voters. The fear is that Democrats in the neglected states will be less likely to win local elections and even the ones who do win a place in Congress are going to be less able to relate to the folks across the aisle. Which is to say, it could cause more gridlock, not less.

The quote that summarizes the thinking behind Hillary Clinton's strategy is here:

“The highest-premium voter in ’92 was a voter who would vote for one party some and for another party some,” said James Carville, Mr. Clinton’s chief strategist in 1992. “Now the highest-premium voter is somebody with a high probability to vote for you and low probability to turn out. That’s the golden list. And that’s a humongous change in basic strategic doctrine.”

The real question is whether this is a capitulation to the reality of a more polarized electorate or if it is just going to exacerbate this polarization. In either case, it seems like a reminder that Hillary is more pragmatic than idealistic, less about changing voters's minds than winning office.